Devin Jones's Open Salon Blog

On Behalf of the Abandoned City: Detroit

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:04:00 -0400

The Detroit Facade

The great mobile city. The car town. Mo-town. Madonna, Stevie Wonder, Eminem, The White Stripes, and even Kid Rock; Detroit used to be a fantastic star (like most of those celebs, ironically). Used to is a key phrase from here on out.

[For better close-ups of photos and links to more go to my blog at www.ezrajones.tumblr.com]

Lansing (Michigan's capital) has been cracking down on education. By that I mean, laying teacher's off, closing public schools (the picture above is of a closed school's room filled to the tippy-top with trash) and cutting scholarships from programs like the MEAP for students. This is all good stuff for brighter and smarter kids taking over in this technologically savvy world, right? This is the solution. Piles of garbage. Now kids know school's important.

The importance of books...

Most schools are worried about empty chairs. Kids not showing up for class. This one is worried about empty floorspace. Even the chairs are getting up and taking off.

I remember texting under my desk with my eyes off the board, sleeping in class and not copying down what was on the board...I wonder how many kids in Detroit schools always see this no matter what's on the chalkboard.

It's not just the schools who are feeling the pain...

A church that has less to worry about Satan than it does rain and chunks of cement.

The Kings Park Psychiatric Center (Asylum) as it falls apart by the seams. Covered, inside and out, with graffiti and vandalism, housing homeless drug addicts and thousands of bubonic rats, this institution is far from a healthcare provider.

Most of these old buildings don't really matter, do they? So what if Detroit's full of them. They don't kill people, do they? How bad can they be?

The next photo I'm posting is quite grotesque, so I'm warning you now.

Gone unreported for months, possibly the majority of winter, a frozen, dead man is found halfway submerged in a lake of ice. Floating in trash, it's hard to find him...until you look.

How could this happen? A city this big couldn't possibly allow one of it's own to just rot and die in a corner...could it?

Detroit is in trouble. And no one is coming to help. Everyone's leaving.

Our Own Joan Thwarts "The Bill"

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 09:06:28 -0400

I had to comment on Joan's epic battle with Bill O'Really a few days back, and I must say that watching this segment between the two was excruciating. It was as if O'Reilly's neuroses were now more prominent and emboldened than the "crazy left" who, as claimed by the angry host, are more emboldened than ever.

How on Earth are the two political party's in todays current policy-game debating over the justification of murder? Thank God Joan's got a good head on her shoulders. Should she have been so hard on her performance in her recent blog? I don't think so at all. How on Earth is anyone supposed to retaliate against a raging lunatic with perfect accuracy? Now more than ever Bill is defending Tiller's death with the lop-sided notion that he killed late term babies in abortions. He lied about the amount of late term abortions in a previous segment telling a guest "60,000 late term abortions, 60,000!". Which we all know is a lie. Joan explained this to him. He ignored it Hannity-style and went on with one silly and rigged question which has nothing to do with whether or not Dr. Tiller's death is justifiable. "Do you think it's okay to terminate babies 21 weeks into a pregnancy?". Why is that the question about Tiller's vicious rightwing murder? It should be, "Why can't FNC tell the truth in a story? Why do conservatives scatter when truth rears its beautifully ugly head?"

Go Team Joan! Normally, I'm not an us-versus-them kinda guy...but I do like a good fight once and a while.

I Am 9015474670

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:02:07 -0500

So, I'm 18. And the mailbox recently treated me to a selective service letter notifying me to sign up or face some kind of beheading I assumed. Nevertheless, I signed up. And in doing so I was given #9015474670. It just popped up, that was it, have a nice day. I couldn't help but feel a little, well, small.

First of all, I've never counted to 90155474670. I certainly don't weigh that much. I definately don't own anything worth that much in this kind of economy. So I thought, "How did I get that #?" Who am I to the United States Selective Service Admission or some other Committee or Congregation under US law?

I guess I just thought that forcing me, an openly gay man, to go sign up for a service which would never allow me inside, was backwards. A paradox of policy and morality according to the machismo of the military services I, a young gay person, become enrolled in a program which could imprison me if I were to go into it. But they made me sign up. So, in essence, they could in fact make me go to prison, am I wrong?

The monumental flaw in US military policy, I must sign up, but I must not take action. What? Crickets cherping in the brains of politicians I assume. But, I believe, that this flaw is a telltale sign much greater than me being inconveinenced and using up two minutes of my time to sign up for something that doesn't want me anyway. It shows a seriously lack of identity and a dissociation between politicians, gay people, and equality.

Gay Marriage, Don't Ask, Gays Can't Be Teachers, the list goes on, and the facts run on empty. There is no reason to continue any of these taboos, or these lies because, quite frankly, they are ancient and rusted and no longer functioning. They are obsolete policy and need to be relinquished. But for some odd reason, they are not discarded as they should, but rather, kept around like beacons of-of-of...what? Nothingness? They run off of Christian moral? Is that all they can muster up? But some how, gay marriage bans, don't ask don't tell and other atrocities against particular citizens still linger. And that lingering does a lot of damage whether we see it, believe it, or not.

I figure that 9015474670 is the governments way of telling me that they have to care about me because John Locke said they must, but they don't have to be real about it because Jesus Christ said they must. It's a paradox as I've stated, and it's a damn ugly one, too.